Spree (YA Paranormal) (7 page)

“Stop Crazy T,” Belinda told me.

“How?”

“Think of what you know of him, of what he’s really hurting over. Force him to face it on the final day.”

I thought of Crazy T’s father, half drunk, on the sofa the day Crazy T killed two kids. I created the image as vividly as I could in my mind, down to the last shade of pale.

As I did, I could see Crazy T at work, whispering, then yelling towards Zipper as he sensed the Keepers floating nearby.

“Grab the gun,” Crazy T said. “Shoot! Kill them all!”

I could see Zipper standing there, contemplating.

“Now, send the image to his aura,” Belinda called out. “Hurry!”

“How?” I asked.

“Just keep thinking that your thoughts become his thoughts.”

I chanted it, even, “My thoughts are your thoughts,” until Crazy T saw not a counselor before him, but his father, yelling at him, threatening to beat him again. The memory sent Crazy T flying towards his fellow Takers, away from Zipper.

“Not yet,” Zipper said.

By this time, counselors, teachers on lunch duty, and administrators had closed off the cafeteria and were pulling students into corners, yelling at them to stop. Flights of Keepers surrounded the kids, fighting the Takers and repelling a few. The kids appeared to calm down, if only slightly. A new wave of crying, cursing, and sobbing swept through the cafeteria. The school police officer appeared, calling it in. It was the first time a food fight in our school warranted police involvement. If the police knew how close they came to a much larger issue, I wonder if they would’ve searched bags, found Zipper’s gun. I tried to create the thought, to send it, but nothing worked.

My last sight was a bawling Steph being escorted out of the cafeteria by a counselor.

The Takers had won the day.

* * *

Zipper’s home was filled with pictures of him as a smiling boy. In one, he stood holding up a bass caught on his line. In another, he won second place in a race when he was ten. In still another photo, he was a player at a soccer middle school challenge and earned a small cup. It was hard to believe what Zipper had become. I sometimes asked myself why, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed the change. Sometime around middle school Zipper grew darker, more depressed. The smiling pictures vanished, and the eyes just weren’t there. It was like he was playing a role for his family, the role of the dutiful student athlete.

The real Zipper had issues, and he was about to take out those issues on a small squirrel he trapped in his basement. I could hear the squirrel sounding out in its animalistic cries, but Zipper was home alone, and he didn’t intend for the squirrel to be alive long enough to concern his parents.

In fact, he had a whole section of the basement sealed off by a concrete wall that looked like his room.

He’d stashed away a few guns, and even had the remains a few animals he’d used as target practice but had not yet discarded.

I wondered what happened to this kid who appeared so normal. He still called and texted a few friends, but only for cover. Otherwise, he’d just fallen off the face of the earth. Then I saw part of what did it. Zipper had been an early boyfriend of mine, if you can call it that, before I moved into the more popular crowd and started dating guys like Alex. Zipper knew that I’d lost my virginity to Alex, and he hated him for it. I never knew this. I never saw his naked aura, which brewed into a steamy black every time he took out this picture he’d taken of me and Alex together, kissing, by the school door. I was wearing Alex’s varsity jacket and his ring. Zipper felt pain, excruciating pain, over this, and he was unable to get over it. With my death, his pain only became more permanent. Zipper had never failed at anything he’d tried—except getting the object of his affections: me. And now his failure would last a lifetime. He couldn’t live with such failure. Neither could the high school world, as he saw it.

“We’ll be together soon enough,” he whispered to the picture. “I wish I got to dance with you at prom just once.”

I’d heard him say this before. I attempted to flood his mind with moments from the pictures I saw, but it was no use. I attempted to remind him of a memory I’d long forgotten, when he and I talked one day about what we’d do when we grew older. Zipper wanted to be a doctor, after he became the first man to land on a planet outside of the solar system. A man had to have priorities. I wanted to be a teacher after I became a world famous rock star. A girl had to have something to live for. We held hands, if briefly. But even then Zipper and his obsession with me creeped me out. I broke it off a few weeks later. I assumed Zipper had long forgotten me, had long retreated into his post-apocalyptic world. I was wrong, and the school might pay for it. I sent as many images of light, of love, as I could, but the light couldn’t penetrate the Takers that swirled all about him. I was a Taker trying to do a Keeper’s job.

“Did you really think I’d let you near my star pupil?” Crazy T asked me. “I’ve been waiting for just the right kid at just the right time. Do you know he’ll kill one of the kids I just couldn’t kill before I died? He’ll kill the brother of another.”

Crazy T smiled, too lost to the darkness that swirled around him to do anything but feed off of my fear. I knew I was going about it all wrong. I needed to find whatever was hurting Crazy T. I

needed to help him move on, or at least to stunt him. I sensed, given the power I showed last time, that there was something about the girl the bullying was over that I needed to discover. But I couldn’t figure it out by watching his black hole of an aura.

“Tomorrow’s his practice day,” Crazy T said, pointing at the pictures.

There was everyone from Alex and Tom to Sue and Steph, the recent addition. I sensed that these, along with two coaches, were the cardinal six. These had to die before he killed himself.

“Choose one,” Crazy T said.

“One what?” I asked.

“Choose one that you want to save. Alex, maybe?”

His smile grew darker than a starless night.

“That’s all you’ll get, if you’re lucky. I don’t think my boy’s ambitious enough. With the plan I show him tomorrow, he’ll make a clean sweep.”

My fear fed Crazy T; I fought to control it.

“Watch my protégé at work,” Crazy T added.

Crazy T and the other Takers swirled about Zipper until he picked up a gun, until he saw the squirrel in his sites.

“Slowly,” I heard Crazy T whisper. “You can’t grow startled. You must learn control.”

Zipper shot at the squirrel’s left hind leg.

It was a direct hit and a bloody mess. Zipper didn’t smile, didn’t react, as the squirrel cried out, scared for its very life. The Takers kept control, ordering him to take out the other leg.

I couldn’t watch, but I heard the trigger. The squirrel cried out again until Keepers swarmed around the innocent life and brought it to its end. I saw the animal spirit rise, join the spirits all around it, as the lifeless body stayed behind. But still the Takers weren’t through. Zipper fired again and again, until each leg had been shot off. Then he shot the head and the heart. His expression didn’t change. Not once.

Zipper simply picked up the body and threw it with the other dead animal bodies in a bag. He took it outside, deep into the woods behind his house, to bury. Zipper had a pit just full of animals. He threw it in there, covered it with dirt and leaves. No neighbors were around to notice. He went back into the basement, hid his gun, wiped up the blood. Zipper was still cleaning the blood when his mother pulled in and called down, “I brought McDonald’s. Get up here before it goes cold.”

“Cold,” Crazy T said. “I don’t think my man minds the cold.”

“In a minute, Mom,” Zipper called up. “I’m almost done.”

He kissed my photo, put it and his target photos away, and started scampering up the stairs like an eager child.

* * *

The phone rang again, and again my mother ignored it. The machine took over, and I heard a woman say, “We’re Burgundy Hill Mothers against Drinking and Driving and we’re calling to express our sympathies. We go around to any school that will have us, speaking for free about what drinking did to the lives of our children. We’re not calling to ask you to join us there, but to join other grieving mothers who went through what you’re going through now. We tried to visit, but no one answered the door. If you want to talk, please call me, Louise Chenning, at 860-659-4354. We’re meeting after the boys’ soccer game at my house on 234 Gold Hill Street at 8 this Friday night. Hope to see you there.”

My mother stared at the phone, reached out for it at one point in the message, but did not pick up. She sat alone, a divorced parent surrounded by flowers and cards from people who meant well but didn’t know anything my mother was going through. My death had launched her into a personal hell of second guessing herself. She asked questions like:
Didn’t I know Fay had a drinking problem
?
Did I allow her too much freedom
?
Why wasn’t I monitoring her Facebook and Twitter accounts
?
Why didn’t I ask her to text me from wherever she was, on the hour, after nine p.m. Why didn’t I get more strict about who she could hang out with and where she could go
?

Mom imagined the day over again. She imagined herself telling me that I had to come home directly after school, that there would be no parties that night or over the weekend until my grades were up so as not to endanger my NHS status. She imagined that her words would’ve made a difference, as if I wouldn’t have found a way to coax her or sneak out anyway.

Mom had it hard. My father left when we were little. If I wanted to, I could fly to him, see him sitting in a bar somewhere, watching a game with his friends. But he was my father in title only. Mom had worked hard to provide for me after he left. While she had a steady string of boyfriends, she never trusted a man enough to settle down and remarry. Now, in the middle of the worst tragedy of her life, my mother was alone.

I teared up myself seeing her cry. How hard it had to be to sacrifice so much for a daughter who became a drunk like her father and didn’t appreciate all the hard work. Years and years of saving up, scrounging, getting by, all for a daughter who’d be dead before her eighteenth birthday. What a terrible waste it all felt like. Yet I knew my mother loved me and wouldn’t have traded me, any more than I might have traded anything for my daughter. Believe it or not, I felt the ability to look into the future that might have been. I saw myself grown up, working odd jobs for low wages, all to put my daughter through school after I got divorced. I would’ve had a hard life, but I wouldn’t have traded my own daughter for anything. And yet I did. I traded her life for alcohol without even knowing it. Maybe she would’ve been the one to break the cycle, to be the professional woman my mother strived to be, the woman I should’ve been working to be.

My mother got up, canvassed my room for alcohol, found a few beer bottles left underneath the underwear in my dresser drawer. I wasn’t exactly careful. And my mother did choose to turn away.

She told herself it was a teen phase like the one she went through and that, like her, I’d get over it.

I saw her looking over the mess of clothes I left behind when choosing what to wear the night I died.

She broke down again. I went to cradle her, to send her aura positive energy, but that’s when Belinda appeared, looking anything but sympathetic.

“Help my mother,” I said to her.

She shook her ghostly head. Her hair, thin strands of pure light, cascaded.

“The Takers are confusing you,” she said. “Remember your mission.”

I felt pure energy glistening all around Belinda, like when the sun gets too bright and spills the extra light across the top of a mountain.

“These next two days will take you down some difficult paths,” a voice in the light told me.

“But hold strong. Share whatever love you have with the image your shown, no matter how harrowing, and we will guide you on. We will help your mother, but don’t forget your friends. Don’t forget the school.”

I didn’t judge myself as harshly as I should have or fall into a sea of self-loathing. I simply hugged my mother, prayed for her, gave her aura whatever love I had, and let go.

As I did, I could see my mother reaching for the phone, dialing a number, saying hello.

* * *

Soccer was huge at my school, where we’d won more Class M division titles than in any other sport, even basketball. And this year we were even bigger. The party I was going to was to celebrate a victory in the finals. Burgundy Hill had advanced and was now going after a state championship. The team hadn’t played a game since my death, and while I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe for a moment that my life or death meant anything to most of those on the soccer field, my death did mean something to one of its star players: Alex.

Alex, a captain, was the team striker and was practicing a few step over moves with his starter, Tom. I’d never really been into soccer, practically sacrilege in our town. Watching the footwork between the two as they alternated step-over strategies with one another, however, I couldn’t help but admire the skill it took to dominate the ball and your opponent. Everything about soccer was teamwork, and to have a striker with anything on his mind but goals was to invite defeat.

“Stop stepping too fast,” Tom told Alex.

“Sorry,” Alex said.

Tom looked down. His face had my name written all over it, but he didn’t say
Fay
, not once.

“I’m sorry for how it all turned out,” Tom said, “and I know today’s fight at lunch got you down. But we have to pull through for both of them.”

“I know,” Alex whispered.

“This is the state championship. We’ve been waiting for the chance to lead the team since freshman year, and I’m not about to let four years of work—”

“I know,” Alex said louder, nearly yelling. “I heard you the first time.”

“It’s screwed up,” Tom said. “This should be the biggest moment of high school for us both, and all we can think about is, well—”